Fences, Sausages, and an Ark Hive: Around Cleveland’s Front International Triennial, Part 2

July 16, 2018 1:12pm

Outside the Transformer Station, which is run by Front CEO Fred Bidwell, A. K. Burns has installed her new sculpture The Dispossessed, two torqued fences that appear to sway like humans dancing. They refer to the kinds of fencing that can be seen around Cleveland’s Ohio City neighborhood that, the artist said, “appear around construction sites and empty lots, as a markers of the ongoing gentrification.”

Outside the Transformer Station, which is run by Front CEO Fred Bidwell, A. K. Burns has installed her new sculpture The Dispossessed, two torqued fences that appear to sway like humans dancing. They refer to the kinds of fencing that can be seen around Cleveland’s Ohio City neighborhood that, the artist said, "appear around construction sites and empty lots, as a markers of the ongoing gentrification."

Much of the Transformer Station has been given over to Stephen Willats’s 2017 project Human Right, which maps a community in Middlesbrough, England, according to their city’s plan and the ways its members view themselves. Various elements of the piece are also sited throughout the surrounding Ohio City neighborhood.

ALEX GREENBERGER/ARTNEWS

Part of Willats’s Berlin Local project, from 2014, which is exhibited alongside Human Right and diagrams social and physical relationships in Berlin’s Kreuzberg neighborhood.

ALEX GREENBERGER/ARTNEWS

In the backyard of the Transformer Station, visitors will find one of Front’s most delectable offerings in the making: John Riepenhoff’s Cleveland Curry Kojiwurst special sausage, produced in collaboration with local farmers and butchers. Here’s the tandoor oven where some are being made.

ALEX GREENBERGER/ARTNEWS

A sign advertising Riepenhoff’s sausages at the West Side Market, where they can be bought either cooked and uncooked. For early risers, they can be consumed here in the form of frittatas.

ALEX GREENBERGER/ARTNEWS

Riepenhoff’s sausages cost $6.49 a pound.

ALEX GREENBERGER/ARTNEWS

One of the triennial’s most talked-about offerings was Dawoud Bey’s Night Coming Tenderly, Black (2017), a photo installation that loosely maps the Underground Railroad as it extended from Hudson, Ohio, to Cleveland. Bey’s dark photographs of branches, fences, and lakes hang above pews in St. John’s Episcopal Church, which was itself an Underground Railroad site.

ALEX GREENBERGER/ARTNEWS

The cavernous Vista Warehouse B plays host to Guillaume Leblon’s installation Busy Time (2018), which also acted as a theater set for a Thomas Boutoux play of the same name about the art world during opening weekend. The set is stripped down and raw, and could just as easily be mistaken for urban wreckage. The audience for the play was made to sit on a riser fashioned out of Styrofoam and foil.

ALEX GREENBERGER/ARTNEWS

Nasser Al-Salem’s neon sculpture Arabi/Gharbi (Arab/Foreigner), 2016, hangs over the entrance to the Akron Art Museum portion of the triennial. The piece plays on the visual similarities between “Arabi” and “Gharbi,” which mean “Arab” and “foreigner,” respectively, in Islamic calligraphy.

ALEX GREENBERGER/ARTNEWS

Nearby, the Akron Art Museum is presenting a series of videos by the now-defunct Visible Collective, whose moving-image work tackles fears of persons of color in post-9/11 America.

Walead Beshty’s sculptures, made from dismantled printers and flat-screen televisions, at the Akron Art Museum. Though broken apart and speared by poles, these digital objects are still alive—they can be heard whirring and sawing throughout the gallery.

ALEX GREENBERGER/ARTNEWS

A detail of a Beshty sculpture.

ALEX GREENBERGER/ARTNEWS

Jessica Vaughn’s After Wills (rubbed, used and moved) #010, 2018, on view at the Akron Art Museum, is crafted from 33 Chicago Transit Authority public transportation seats. They refer to the movement of people throughout cities and, in their modular arrangement, to the history of Minimalism.

ALEX GREENBERGER/ARTNEWS

: Maryam Jafri’s Product Innovation: An Index of Innovation. I Hate (2015), on view at the Akron Art Museum, features consumer goods alongside texts produced by the artist about them. Here are boxes of vegetables that seem strangely to actively not want people to buy them.

ALEX GREENBERGER/ARTNEWS

And here’s the text Jafri wrote to go with the boxes.

ALEX GREENBERGER/ARTNEWS

Gerard Byrne’s video installation In Our Time (2017), which first appeared at last year’s Skulptur Projekte Münster and which focuses on a radio station, at the Akron Art Museum.

ALEX GREENBERGER/ARTNEWS

At Playhouse Square in Cleveland, Candice Breitz is showing her seven-screen video installation Love Story (2016), which first appeared at the South African Pavilion at the Venice Biennale last year. Breitz had Julianne Moore and Alec Baldwin sit in front of green screens and carefully re-perform interviews with refugees who were forced to emigrate from their home countries. The result is a complex meditation on who gets to represent whom and the meaning of performance today.

ALEX GREENBERGER/ARTNEWS

Baldwin donning sunglasses indoors as part of Breitz’s Love Story.

ALEX GREENBERGER/ARTNEWS

Behind this screen, Breitz is showing the interviews she conducted with the refugees themselves.

ALEX GREENBERGER/ARTNEWS

To see the fantastic Let It Bee Ark Hive, which is being exhibited at the triennial by Julie Ezelle Patton, who’s based in the city’s historic Glenville neighborhood, a tour must be arranged. Don’t let that deter you. You’ll want to see how Ezelle Patton has paid homage to her mother, the artist Virgie Ezelle Patton, through a series of rooms in the building where she once lived that combine and collage Virgie and Julie’s work, as well as their belongings. It’s a meditation on the city’s rich artistic history, which is still largely unknown to people outside the Rust Belt region.

ALEX GREENBERGER/ARTNEWS

One of the most touching works at the triennial is a reconstructed mural by Julian Stanczak, the Cleveland-based Op artist who died last year at 88. The mural once appeared in this same location, in the city’s Downtown district, in 1970, and its eye-popping red and orange forms are still in the process of being repainted. It’s part of a larger mural project that will also place works by Kay Rosen and Oditi Donald Odita in the neighborhood.